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A Mid-20th-Century Map of Manufacturing Employment - Or Is It Just a Map of Population?
This Sales Management County Outline Manufacturing Employment Map of 1969 delineates the number of non-agricultural employees across United States counties, employing a color-coded system based on data from their Market Statistics Division. It reveals the industrial fabric of the nation, highlighting areas of dense manufacturing employment and economic vigor. Or so it says. On closer examination, the map appears to be not much more than a population density map minus farmers.
In the late 1960s, America's industrial landscape was marked by a significant concentration of manufacturing jobs in specific regions, reflective of the country's post-war economic dominance. This map categorizes counties into hierarchical employment brackets, from those with fewer than a hundred to those with over fifty thousand non-agricultural employees, providing a granular view of the industrial workforce distribution. Notably, it marks counties ranked among the top six hundred in the nation for non-agricultural employment, underscoring the stratification of industrial activity.
The distinction between uppercase letters indicating the number of manufacturing employees in larger plants and lowercase letters denoting the "Value added by manufacturing" underlines the industrial patterns of the era. Approximately 80% of manufacturing employment was concentrated in plants with over a hundred employees, a statistic emphasizing the central role of large-scale manufacturing in the economic landscape of the time.
As a document of economic history, this map records the geospatial distribution of industry before the shifts brought about by globalization and technological innovation. For contemporary observers, it provides context to the current economic geography, serving as a benchmark against which to measure the profound transformations that have occurred in the more-than-half-century since its publication.
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